Perception, Imagination, and Demonstrative Reference: A Sellarsian Account (original) (raw)

In an important late paper, ‘The Role of the Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Experience’, Sellars brings together ideas about the complex nature of perceptual consciousness and the content of perceptual demonstratives. In a development of his previous ideas about perception, he clarifies the key role played by the imagination in integrating the conceptual and sensory (or phenomenal) components of perceptual experience. I propose a modification of Sellars’s views on the imagination, and show how the resulting conception explains the different ways in which experiences can be conceptualised. I then discuss how the account enables us to understand exactly how, according to the Sellarsian critical realist analysis of experience, we are able to make demonstrative judgements about physical objects, while avoiding a problematic appeal to neo-Russellian notions of acquaintance. Key words: perceptual experience; causal theory of perception; critical realism; Wilfrid Sellars; demonstrative reference; acquaintance; imagination; Kant